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Physicists have proposed an experiment that could force us to make a choice between extremes to describe the behaviour of the Universe. The proposal comes from an international team of researchers from Switzerland, Belgium, Spain and Singapore, and is published today in Nature Physics. It is based on what the researchers call a 'hidden influence inequality'. This exposes how quantum predictions challenge our best understanding about the nature of space and time, Einstein's theory of relativity. "We are interested in whether we can explain the funky phenomena we observe without sacrificing our sense of things happening smoothly in space and...

n March 2012, Joseph Polchinski began to contemplate suicide — at least in mathematical form. A string theorist at the Kavli Institute for Theoretical Physics in Santa Barbara, California, Polchinski was pondering what would happen to an astronaut who dived into a black hole. Obviously, he would die. But how? According to the then-accepted account, he wouldn’t feel anything special at first, even when his fall took him through the black hole’s event horizon: the invisible boundary beyond which nothing can escape. But eventually — after hours, days or even weeks if the black hole was big enough — he...

Ex nihilo: Dynamical Casimir effect in metamaterial converts vacuum fluctuations into real photons March 8, 2013 by Stuart Mason Dambrot Copyright © PNAS, doi:10.1073/pnas.1212705110 (Phys.org) —In the strange world of quantum mechanics, the vacuum state (sometimes referred to as the quantum vacuum, simply as the vacuum) is a quantum system's lowest possible energy state. While not containing physical particles, neither is it an empty void: Rather, the quantum vacuum contains fluctuating electromagnetic waves and so-called virtual particles, the latter being known to transition into and out of existence. In addition, the vacuum state has zero-point energy – the lowest quantized...

Scientists create never-before-seen form of matter Photons with strong mutual attraction in a quantum nonlinear medium. Harvard and MIT scientists are challenging the conventional wisdom about light, and they didn't need to go to a galaxy far, far away to do it. Working with colleagues at the Harvard-MIT Center for Ultracold Atoms, a group led by Harvard Professor of Physics Mikhail Lukin and MIT Professor of Physics Vladan Vuletic have managed to coax photons into binding together to form molecules – a state of matter that, until recently, had been purely theoretical. The work is described in a September 25...

A book titled “Biocentrism: How Life and Consciousness Are the Keys to Understanding the Nature of the Universe“ has stirred up the Internet, because it contained a notion that life does not end when the body dies, and it can last forever. The author of this publication, scientist Dr. Robert Lanza who was voted the 3rd most important scientist alive by the NY Times, has no doubts that this is possible.[...]The theory implies that death of consciousness simply does not exist. It only exists as a thought because people identify themselves with their body. They believe that the body is...

All of the matter in the universe—everything we see, feel and smell—has a certain predictable structure, thanks to the tiny electrons spinning around their atomic nuclei in a series of concentric shells or atomic levels. A fundamental tenet of this orderly structure is that no two electrons can occupy the same atomic level (quantum state) at the same time—a principle called the Pauli exclusion principle, which is based on Albert Einstein’s theory of relativity and quantum theory. However, a team of Syracuse University physicists recently developed a new theoretical model to explain how the Pauli exclusion principle can be violated...

Almost a century ago, renowned quantum theorist Werner Heisenberg found fundamental limits on how well a quantum system can be prepared and measured, known as Heisenberg's uncertainty principle. However, only the limit that pertains to the preparation of quantum systems has been quantified; the other two, relating to measurements, have long been a matter of debate, lacking a formal treatment. These limits are: That it is impossible to jointly measure incompatible quantities, for instance, location and speed of a quantum object, with perfect accuracy; and that a measurement of one of these quantities necessarily disturbs the other. Last year, UQ's...

In a paper published in the current issue of the scientific journal Nature Communications and titled "Direct measurement of a 27-dimensional orbital-angular-momentum state vector," a team of physicists led by the University of Rochester's Mehul Malik describe how they circumvented a basic principle of uncertainty that requires that some states of a quantum system must be understood poorly if other states are to be understood well. Determining a quantum state, such as the position of an electron or the momentum of a photon, is tricky, to say the least. That's because subatomic particles behave nothing at all like billiard balls,...

Physicists have spent a century puzzling over the paradoxes of quantum theory. Now a few of them are trying to reinvent it. If the truth be told, few physicists have ever really felt comfortable with quantum theory. Having lived with it now for more than a century, they have managed to forge a good working relationship; physicists now routinely use the mathematics of quantum behaviour to make stunningly accurate calculations about molecular structure, high-energy particle collisions, semiconductor behaviour, spectral emissions and much more. But the interactions tend to be strictly formal. As soon as researchers try to get behind the...

According to the First Law of Thermodynamics, nothing in the Universe (i.e., matter or energy) can pop into existence from nothing (see Miller, 2013). All of the scientific evidence points to that conclusion. So, the Universe could not have popped into existence before the alleged “big bang” (an event which we do not endorse). Therefore, God must have created the Universe. One of the popular rebuttals by the atheistic community is that quantum mechanics could have created the Universe. In 1905, Albert Einstein proposed the idea of mass-energy equivalence, resulting in the famous equation, E = mc2 (1905). We now...

The effects of relativity can be seen in everyday phenomena © ShutterstockWhy is mercury a liquid at room temperature? If you ask that question in a school classroom you will probably be told that relativity affects the orbitals of heavy metals, contracting them and changing how they bond. However, the first evidence that this explanation is correct has only just been published.An international team led by Peter Schwerdtfeger of Massey University Auckland in New Zealand used quantum mechanics to make calculations of the heat capacity of the metal either including or excluding relativistic effects. They showed that if they...

Government Lab Reveals It Has Operated Quantum Internet for Over Two Years A quantum internet capable of sending perfectly secure messages has been running at Los Alamos National Labs for the last two and a half years, say researchers One of the dreams for security experts is the creation of a quantum internet that allows perfectly secure communication based on the powerful laws of quantum mechanics.The basic idea here is that the act of measuring a quantum object, such as a photon, always changes it. So any attempt to eavesdrop on a quantum message cannot fail to leave telltale signs...

Two new studies to be published in the European Physical Journal D demonstrate that the speed of light is variable in real space. Textbook explanations of the speed of light assume that light travels in a vacuum, but space is not a vacuum. … It is not expected that the small variation in the speed of light which has been found will affect the universally accepted theories of particle physics and quantum mechanics to a large extent. However, the studies are proof that the speed of light may be variable, and shows that the mathematical treatments that have long been...

Particles do not retain "information", don't have "knowledge". It is not that the act of observation that alters reality. In fact the physical nature of the "observation" small though it may be is sufficient to alter the metrics of sub atomic particles.

When quantum mechanics meets general relativityThe unification of quantum mechanics and Einstein's general relativity is one of the most exciting and still open questions in modern physics. General relativity, the joint theory of gravity, space and time gives predictions that become clearly evident on a cosmic scale of stars and galaxies. Quantum effects, on the other hand, are fragile and are typically observed on small scales, e.g. when considering single particles and atoms. That is why it is very hard to test the interplay between quantum mechanics and general relativity. Now theoretical physicists led by Prof. ÄŒaslav Brukner at the...

Researchers have bent one of the most basic rules of quantum mechanics, a counterintuitive branch of physics that deals with atomic-scale interactions. Its "complementarity" rule asserts that it is impossible to observe light behaving as both a wave and a particle, though it is strictly both. In an experiment reported in Science, researchers have now done exactly that. They say the feat "pulls back the veil" on quantum reality in a way that was thought to be prohibited by theory. Quantum mechanics has spawned and continues to fuel spirited debates about the nature of what we can see and measure,...

Researchers claim to have produced sought-after quantum effect. A team of physicists is claiming to have coaxed sparks from the vacuum of empty space1. If verified, the finding would be one of the most unusual experimental proofs of quantum mechanics in recent years and "a significant milestone", says John Pendry, a theoretical physicist at Imperial College London who was not involved in the study. The researchers, based at the Chalmers University of Technology in Gothenburg, Sweden, will present their findings early next week at a workshop in Padua, Italy. They have already posted a paper on the popular pre-print server...

Quantum physicists at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology believe it is possible to create a time machine which could affect the past without creating a "grandfather paradox".Scientists have for some years been able to 'teleport' quantum states from one place to another. Now Seth Lloyd and his MIT team say that, using the same principles and a further strange quantum effect known as 'postselection', it should be possible to do the same backwards in time. Lloyd told the Technology Review: "It is possible for particles (and, in principle, people) to tunnel from the future to the past."

A fresh take on a classic experiment makes no progress in unifying quantum mechanics and relativity. If you ever want to get your head around the riddle that is quantum mechanics, look no further than the double-slit experiment. This shows, with perfect simplicity, how just watching a wave or a particle can change its behaviour. The idea is so unpalatable to physicists that they have spent decades trying to find new ways to test it. The latest such attempt, by physicists in Europe and Canada, used a three-slit version — but quantum mechanics won out again. In the standard double-slit...

A radical reformulation of quantum mechanics suggests that the universe has a set destiny and its pre-existing fate reaches back in time to influence the past. It could explain the origin of life, dark energy and solve other cosmic conundrums.The universe has a destiny—and this set fate could be reaching backwards in time and combining with influences from the past to shape the present. It’s a mind-bending claim, but some cosmologists now believe that a radical reformulation of quantum mechanics in which the future can affect the past could solve some of the universe’s biggest mysteries, including how life arose....